


Coming to Terms

by RurouniHime



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Baby Names, Baby in Danger, Bottom Draco, Discussion of Abortion, From Sex to Love, Hurt/Comfort, Love/Hate, M/M, Magical Pregnancy, Major Character Injury, Mpreg, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 12:11:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1982490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the lives in all the world, Harry had to own this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [faynia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/faynia/gifts).



> It has been brought to my attention by two very dedicated ficcer friends that this story NEVER MADE IT ONTO THIS ARCHIVE. What was I thinking?? How did I miss this???
> 
> Oh well, damage done, here it is. Wow, it's weird to be picking through HP tags again. O.o
> 
>  **This fic is not epilogue-compliant.** Originally written for the hd_inspired mpreg exchange. HERE THERE BE BABIES IN VERY UNPREPARED MALE BELLIES. You have been warned.
> 
> (Because clearly Draco ate a baby, duh.)

“You fucking  _arse_ ,” Draco said, right before lunging forward and belting Harry in the gut.   
  
Harry reeled, spinning in through his own front door and back against the wall before Draco was on him, and he was taken down to the floor. It didn’t even occur to him to fight back until Draco had already hit him again twice.  
  
“You—” Draco’s voice cracked and seethed with far more malice than Harry could recall warranting, and a good dose of frenzy. “It’s your fault!”  
  
Harry reached and snatched Draco’s flailing hands from the air right in front of his face, feeling the wind of their passage rush over his skin. “Leave off! What the hell are you doing?”  
  
Draco’s eyes became narrower than crescent moons. “Should never have slept with you,” he hissed, jerking a hand free and swinging again.  
  
Harry caught his wrist and squeezed hard enough to make Draco gasp. “Mutual decision,” he growled. “You are such a prick, what’s your problem?”  
  
“You, Potter! Salazar, you poison everything you touch, you damn well fuck it over—”  
  
“How exactly did I manage to fuck you over this time, Malfoy?”  
  
“I’m fucking pregnant, you— you fuck—”  
  
 _“What?”_  It was too much. The laugh spilled out of him before he could stop it, empty of humour and just full of resignation, because this was the way his life went, wasn’t it, this was just the sort of thing to follow him around, and he didn’t even love Draco Malfoy, they’d just fucked in unorthodox ways, and Harry dropped his head back hard on the wooden floor and wheezed with laughter.  
  
Draco’s hand fell again, but the blow was soft, glancing. Nothing left behind it. He sank full-bodied onto Harry’s chest, head turned so his cheek rested on Harry’s sternum. Harry saw loss in his eyes, dull grey and tired of whatever horrors they had dreamt up in the time between discovery and revelation. His face was lined, two tiny spurs between his brows. He looked like he’d kept himself from sleep, probably from food, hour after hour after hour of relentless, unceasing, vague fear.  
  
“You’re serious?” It came out as a whisper, startling Harry with its own softness. Draco raised his eyes.  
  
“You’re a shit, Potter,” was the snarled response.  
  
Harry grappled with Draco’s shoulders, holding him down as he struggled to rise. “Hold still—  _Stop._  Hold on.”  
  
Draco shuddered into stillness again, slumped against Harry, breathing hard. It was a strange parody of too-vivid memories. Harry pulled his hands from the other man’s shoulders before he could think. But Draco did not move immediately, and finally Harry let his hands fall again.  
  
“You have to explain it to me, because I don’t believe it,” he said, staring at the ceiling.  
  
“Then don’t believe it.” Draco’s voice was flat and devoid of energy. “See what good it does you.”  
  
“You’re a man, Draco,” Harry countered, and Draco shoved himself up and off with nothing but a grunt. Harry got his elbows under himself and watched the other man pull back, first onto his knees, and then his feet.   
  
“Boy or girl?” Harry managed, not even knowing why he was asking.  
  
Draco brushed himself off with a jerk. “I don’t care,” he muttered.  
  
Harry frowned, and then got to his feet with very little grace. He rubbed his smarting stomach. Stared at Draco. Looked away, and then returned to staring again. “Why are you even here if you don’t care?”  
  
Draco sneered at him. “Wanted to see the look on your face.”  
  
With that, the blond man turned and went directly into the sitting room. He slumped down on the couch and promptly flung his face into his hands.  
  
It took Harry a bit longer to make his feet move from their place on the wood floor of his front hallway. He stared at Draco’s hunched form through the doorway for at least a minute before finding that he was in fact moving into the sitting room as well.  
  
“It’s late, Draco,” he said. “Past one.”  
  
Draco shrugged without looking up. Harry rubbed his forehead, suddenly back to being tired, back to wanting his bed and the perfect darkness of sleep. Maybe it was his own weariness bleeding over, but Draco’s frame seemed to echo it back at him, magnifying it across the room. Gods, he shouldn’t have gone to the damned club again, it was a work night, and now he was bloody tired and nothing made any  _sense_.  
  
He tried to think about a baby— Founders almighty— and couldn’t get his mind around it.  
  
“Lie down,” he said at last.   
  
This time Draco did look up. “What?” he snarled.  
  
“I’ll get you a blanket. Go to sleep, you arse.”  
  
Draco swung his head slowly back to rest in his hands, face a deadpan. He did not move from his position. Harry went over to the rocking chair and pulled the folded blanket off its back. He set it on the couch cushion as far from Draco as possible, hesitated for a moment, and then strode into the longer hallway beyond and yanked open a cupboard. More blankets. He deposited two of them atop the first, along with a pillow.  
  
Something nagged at him as he straightened. Nagged him all the way back to the wall, where he contemplated leaning. But there was really no purpose in that.  
  
“You can stay the night,” he said.  
  
“Why in Slytherin’s horrid nightmares would I want to do that?” Draco muttered listlessly.   
  
Harry felt his brows pinch vaguely. Draco did have his own flat. Draco had his own life, and Harry certainly hadn’t been aware of what it entailed before tonight. He didn’t know now either, not really. He looked at the other man for a few more seconds and then made his way slowly out of the sitting room and to the front door. There he stood, one hand on the knob and the other on the lock, for some time. His stomach knotted once— twice— He wasn’t sure why. Couldn’t define it. His fingers clenched around the lock and snapped it shut, and then flew to his pocket, scrabbling until they found their way around the length of holly. He tugged his wand free.  
  
“Domus securum.”  
  
A heaviness thudded down over the door, locking out sound and light, and the outside.  
  
And wherever… wherever Draco might have gone, were he not in the other room.  
  
Again, the sense of dread was undefined. Harry left the warded door. Draco was now on his side on the couch, all three blankets drawn over his body from feet to shoulders. His shoes sat on the ground in a crooked pile of two. Harry felt the silence like a physical pressure in his head. He went down the long hall to his room, tugged his clothing off, and wrapped himself in sheets until he was quite tangled.  
  
He lay awake for about ten minutes before it struck him at last, somewhere in the cracks of his ceiling, and he bolted upright, blinking. The dread had solidified. Harry stared into the darkness of his room in the direction of the sitting room, and thought that Draco might have gone to a place where he could rid himself of the baby, were he elsewhere tonight.  
  
~*~  
  
 _Six weeks ago_  
  
It hadn’t exactly been the best way to end his wretched workweek. It was the standard way, but that did not automatically mean good. Beers were standard. Shots were not, but half the team had practically been blown up that very afternoon, and who was to say that shots were not warranted?  
  
Malfoy still had grass on his shirt.  
  
“You’ve got grass on your shirt,” Harry said helpfully, pointing with his sloshing pint and one dangerously extended finger.  
  
“Sod you, Potter,” Malfoy snapped. His hand shook as he raked it through his hair. Harry thought randomly that it might shake that way for the next few days. Or maybe forever; there were still curses they hadn’t identified in the mess. He himself had been hit with one that made it impossible to remember nearly five minutes of his experience.   
  
He knew he’d been running. He knew he’d woken at the bottom of a hill he couldn’t remember having seen, arms splayed and ankle twisted and smoke in his eyes. That was all, and right now, that was fucking enough.  
  
“I’m quitting,” Harry announced, slinging half his pint onto the table in his vehemence. “Fucking quitting.”  
  
“You are such a liar,” Draco scoffed. “You couldn’t afford yourself if you quit. Be evic… evit… thrown out of your flat in two days, you would.”  
  
“Shite!” Harry yelled, absolutely furious for the space of three whole seconds. His loop of a life was such a sodding joke. Leave it to England’s economy to pick away at his small fortune by way of the nearest rent payment or clothing replacement. If he only worked for the Ministry and not this corporate-owned cheapskate of a curse-breaking business— “Need another job.”  
  
“Can’t get one without quitting this one,” Draco offered, nodding. “Can’t quit without a new job. Veritably fucked over.”  
  
“I hate you, you arse,” Harry hissed.  
  
Draco laughed and knocked back two shots in a row, then shoved the third at Harry. “If you think I care, you’re stupider than I thought.”  
  
It didn’t take very long for the music and the hours-old threat of death to drag Harry out onto the dance floor, his limbs practically shaking with the need to burn off the sense of mortality. His jaw hurt with clenching, and all he could see was a strobed mess of memory: the white-hot blast of curses going off under their feet, the thud of his teammates hitting the ground, the screams and the darkening sky. Clean-up afterward, picking through washes of stagnated hex magic while trying not to catch the tail end of any of it. Dirt ground under his fingernails and into the cuts on his cheek. The kiss of cool air through the ripped fabric just over his ribs. He needed a shag, gods, he needed— His breath came too fast suddenly, and he threw himself under blinking blue and red and yellow, and wiped his mind of everything but the smell of sweat and movement and too-close bodies.  
  
It was almost twenty minutes later that he nearly fell, mashed up against an olive-skinned man with a bare, perfect chest and an erection Harry could feel through their trousers. Backwards, a tumble into the dark whorl of dancing bodies, bumping heavily into the person behind him: Malfoy turned from his own conquest and caught him before he hit the floor, smelling of booze and sweat, stumbling under Harry’s weight. “Fuck, Potter, be careful. Crack your skull.”  
  
“Would you be crushed, Malfoy?” Harry wheedled, head spinning in delightful drunkenness. Malfoy squinted at him blearily.  
  
“Under your weight, maybe,” he answered at last. He was warm and pressed all up against Harry, keeping himself on his feet just as much as he kept Harry there. Someone lurched into Malfoy from behind, sending him into Harry, and Harry leaned forward, brushed that damp golden hair out of his way, and snogged Malfoy deeply, feeling elated and distant. An olive hand clamped onto his shoulder; Harry smacked it away with a distracted slap and gathered Malfoy to him by his waist and hips and thighs. Malfoy shoved him around in a circle until they were crushed up against a speaker, and bit his throat and his ear, hands running over his arse and thumbing the waistline of his jeans.  
  
“Almost got killed tonight, Potter,” Malfoy gasped through reddened lips, the buttons on his shirt a poor obstacle to the friction of their bodies. “Least you could do is make it up to me.”  
  
Harry didn’t see why it was his responsibility. But he also didn’t care much. Malfoy needed; Harry was happy to oblige, however selfishly. “Let’s go,” he managed around Malfoy’s tongue.  
  
Malfoy’s flat was simple and small, not as decorated as Harry might have expected. But he wasn’t there to peruse anything except the pale skin he’d already gotten half out of designer clothes. Malfoy kissed deeply and desperately every time, be it mouth or throat or arm. The age-old question of topping was answered with no question at all: just Malfoy dropping onto his back across his own bed, and a bare leg cinching itself tightly around Harry’s waist to tug him in. Harry went; Malfoy fit well against him, under him and around him, even with all the fervent clutching and moving and thrusting they were doing. Harry hadn’t seen anyone who threw his head to the side like that just as he arched, just as he came, but the moonlight looked very nice over milky skin and sweat. It was damned good, and it took a long, frustratingly sweet while despite their inebriated state. It pulled all the anxiety right out through Harry’s mouth and limbs and pores, and flung it into some black hole somewhere, and Harry had never had such a perfect climax. Such a  _necessary_  one.  
  
Malfoy yanked a pillow under his head, rolled onto his stomach, and fell asleep like a dead thing. Harry followed suit almost immediately.  
  
The morning light was still weak against the walls when Malfoy got out of his bed, pulled on jeans, and tossed Harry’s clothes his way. Harry had them on in a few seconds, and was striding down the steps into the early sunshine, wincing at the watery light, in no time at all.  
  
~*~  
  
 _Present day_  
  
The morning light was warm and gold, and it spilled over Harry’s smallish nook of a kitchen in drifty beams. Harry set a plate of eggs on the table and stepped back to lean against the counter with both hands. Draco frowned down at the plate as if looking straight through it. He picked up a fork and began to eat.  
  
The front door was already unlocked. But there was something in the light and drowse of the morning that made the necessity seem a bit less… of a necessity.  
  
“You can stop looking at me like that,” Draco bit out between mouthfuls of egg. Still prim: he touched a napkin to his lips and set it down before aiming his fork once more. “Nothing’s going to come of it anyway.”  
  
Did it warrant an argument? Harry’s insides tugged at him, a faint nudge of the previous night’s urgency. “You didn’t try to leave,” he commented. “I would have known.”  
  
Draco’s frown went darker. “You locked me in for this?” He stabbed two fingers in the general direction of his midsection. Harry found suddenly that the response was a little more than he was capable of giving.  
  
“You needed to sleep,” he said instead.  _On it,_  went unspoken. Godric, he had no bloody idea how many nights Malfoy had in fact slept on it. Maybe he, Harry Potter, needed to sleep on it. Maybe he needed to lock the other less controllable aspects of the situation down while he meandered his way through it. Hells, maybe he needed to actually see it as a reality instead of this strange filmy weirdness.  
  
Draco nodded in a wide, swinging manner that spoke more of exasperation than agreement. He ate more eggs, and then more toast, and then took a sip of orange juice. Napkin again. “Just so you know,” he began, and then didn’t bother to finish for so long that Harry wondered if he was already supposed to know whatever it was.   
  
But Draco turned abruptly and looked him over, head to foot, without emotion. He went back to his eggs. “The chances of a male carrying to term are very slim, Potter,” he said crisply. Orange juice. Napkin. “The ba—  _They_ usually just reabsorb themselves when they figure out where the fuck they’ve got to.”  
  
“Oh,” Harry said. That made sense, if anything did. There were a lot of questions that were necessary. How? Where? Well, he knew the ‘where’: Draco’s lush bed with its mound of pillows. The ‘why’ could easily be lost in alcohol, and the ‘when’ was the one and only. He wasn’t even giving ‘who’ the time of day, for Godric’s sake. But… How? He was a bit stuck on that one.   
  
“How far along are you?” he asked, even though he could have figured it out.  
  
Draco pushed his plate aside and stood. “A month and twenty-three days. Good bye, Potter.”  
  
“And how?” Harry asked in a tone he probably should not have indulged in. Draco flipped his hair back off his forehead without looking in Harry’s direction. He didn’t appear to be any different. He was still lean and well-clothed, and snotty as sin. Gorgeous enough to shag even without alcohol, and a good curse-breaker to have at one’s back, that was no secret. Harry was willing to bet that his abdomen was still as taut as it had been, bared before him that night in the shadowy light of Draco’s room.  
  
“Some fucking curse.” Draco straightened his shirt and left the kitchen, heading for his coat where it lay folded over the couch’s arm. Harry couldn’t even remember him wearing it the night before. He followed slowly from the kitchen. Draco put himself to rights and kept talking. “And here I thought the only risk on the waiver was cruel and unnatural dismemberment. Don’t you dare ask for more information, Potter. I didn’t give enough of a shite to listen.”  
  
Harry shrugged. But the night he’d nearly had his team blasted into the netherworld came slinking back. Gods, what had he himself been hit with? Could have been anything under the sun, anything at all. It was so damned ludicrous. Ridiculous and stupid, and just… stupider than stupid, fuck, pregnant?   
  
“Cheers for the eggs, Potter,” Draco said blandly. “And the couch.”  
  
And he went to the front door. And left.  
  
~*~  
  
The next few weeks were work-logged and backed up. There were the idiot children from Hampshire playing at curses their older siblings should not even know about, and the tedious clean up involved for the Muggles who had been unlucky enough to get hit. Then there was the huge manor by the Channel and its five hundred and sixty-seven rooms (including catacomb chambers). Harry looked for a sickly Draco, a pale and a wan Draco. What he found was Draco going about his business as normal: down in tunnels or up in attics bludgeoning twisted invocations out of walls with his usual snipish curl of phrase. Normal, normal.  
  
Except that he never quite wandered completely into Harry’s personal sphere. The occasional team meeting placed them in the same large room at least once a week. But Harry’s partners ranged through the group with a noticeable randomness. Alexa in Hampshire. Maureen and Tyrell at the Channel. Which was where he was, watching Draco Malfoy stride down the murky underground corridor between two trick pillars that were shivering with their trapped curses like delighted imps with blood in their sights.   
  
He did not look bigger about the middle. Harry had seen no trace of illness. No trace of absence from work, no trace of absence of any kind. Draco Malfoy was Draco Malfoy, as he always—  
  
The first hex shot forth with an acidic hiss, leaving a red trail to drip through the air behind it. It caught Morgan across the back, glancing away without bearing its full brunt. The air sizzled and twisted in its wake. Alexa staggered; the signs of magically induced vertigo were obvious to Harry even from down the hall. The curse zipped toward Draco, malignant as basilisk poison, carving sickness through the air in a wide radius.  
  
Draco headed off the hex easily with nothing but a flick of his wand tip. It tried to rebound, and he snatched it back with a sneer and blew it into oblivion with a charm. Harry watched the process with studied gaze. Draco did not even hint at turning to look at him.  
  
It was hard to question the blond’s able state after that.  
  
Surely a pregnancy where it shouldn’t be would… Harry knew enough about his own profession to understand the lasting effects of most curses. They did things to the body that his team was constantly being treated for or inoculated against. Heavy magical shielding was often necessary; surely a fetus would cause a bit of trouble in that regard. The magical signatures would be all out of whack. Female members of the team had it spelled into their contracts to take immediate leave should they become pregnant. The risks were obvious, even to fools.  
  
On Friday Harry sat in his office making his way through a mound of botched paperwork, compliments of Harrison W. Carmichael, the newest addition to the team and straight out of Hogwarts. Clocking out was beside the point; Harry knew the stack of bills on his kitchen counter at home was nearly as big as Carmichael’s mess, and Harry wasn’t going to be paid for Easter, was he? They were pricks, the lot of them. “Bloody well like to see them live off this payroll,” Harry muttered as he rewrote and shredded documents, and all of a sudden, he just had to give up and wonder.  
  
Perhaps Draco was no longer pregnant.  
  
The sensation of loss was a bit unsettling. It had been a bloody month and a half since he’d found out. And Harry had never really  _believed_ -believed it anyway, had he? Perhaps ‘believed’ was the wrong word. He’d just never accepted it. If it had been a joke, then Draco Malfoy had missed the damn punchline entirely, and that never happened.  
  
Harry sat back, his quill drifting down to his desk. He scruffed a hand through his hair and pondered options. One: the baby had been… reabsorbed— Harry’s stomach didn’t really like that word but there it was— as nature probably intended, and Draco was no longer pregnant. Or two: Draco had physically gone out and had it taken care of weeks ago. Maybe that same week that he’d arrived on Harry’s doorstep with fists flying.  
  
“Should I have said something?” Done something? Merlin, he hadn’t really reacted much at all. Hadn’t done anything. And now Harry felt that he should have tried some convincing on his own behalf, because wasn’t the baby half his anyway?  
  
Of course, he didn’t own half of Draco’s body. Draco could do— and would do— what he saw fit to keep himself healthy and able. And what would Draco Malfoy do with a baby anyway? The consequences were more than staggering. Harry hadn’t heard of this sort of situation at all in his twenty-three years. The media would eat the male bearer of a baby alive. Not to mention the already precarious state of Draco’s infamy from the war; he was only just starting to come out of ostracism and into acceptance, if not welcome.  
  
Harry’s stomach slowly grew sicker, until he was wallowing in downright nausea.  
  
Of course Draco would have terminated. He had every right. And Harry had missed any chance to stop him by being a passive idiot.  
  
And then his thoughts flipped, and it just seemed unlikely that Draco would ever have gone to that extreme. He hadn’t sounded as if he were considering that road, not really. He’d… talked of natural reabsorption. Of the odds. That wasn’t the mindset of someone set on doing away with a pregnancy, was it? Harry felt his lack of experience like a tonne of rocks upon his back.  
  
His lack of action bit at him even more sharply.   
  
“Oh, for Merlin’s… You didn’t have any right!” Harry chastised himself. How in the world could he assume any say in the state of Draco Malfoy’s body? “It’s his business. Always has been, from the moment you left his house the morning after.”  
  
It was true: Harry had never had any intention of turning their one-off into a full-time gig. Nor had he had the inclination to add emotional attachment to overwhelming physical lust for his co-worker’s admittedly fantastic body. He wasn’t head over heels for Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy obviously wasn’t head over heels for him. Their bodies had fit together very nicely, in a very pleasurable way and for a longer time than Harry had expected. It had been great, and then it had been over.  
  
But the baby had been his.   
  
Was his. Had been? He didn’t like not knowing, but there was really no reason why he should know, frankly. The cold, hard fact. Harry was suddenly angry. Furious. He shoved the pile of parchment off his desk and onto the floor with one hard smack of his right hand.   
  
“Fuck.”  
  
He didn’t even know if he could ask. Not that he didn’t have a right to do that; Harry felt that his rights should extend that far at least. He just didn’t know if he could actually find a way to do it.  
  
~*~  
  
“Malfoy. Floo reservation time’s almost over.”  
  
Draco raised an eyebrow without raising his head from his paperwork. “Then you’d better move your arse, Potter.”  
  
Harry frowned at him from the doorway. “Team’s bloody left for Hartwell. If you’re coming—”  
  
“I’m not,” Draco interrupted. He stacked a finished portfolio on the left side of his desk and reached to the right for another. “Too much to do here.”  
  
Harry scrutinised the portfolios. All bore the Rampenstein Manor seal on their front. “Ah, so you’re the unlucky sot.”  
  
At last Draco looked up, expression outwardly hard, but tweaked into satisfaction underneath. “Do you have any idea what time I’ll get home tonight?”  
  
Harry glared at him.  
  
Draco smirked. “I’ll have time for a long bath before bed, Potter. While you are out scouring a mausoleum,  _not_ earning overtime because it’s not covered for the remainder of May. Not when you’re on call.”  
  
“Sod you, Malfoy.”  
  
“Have an enjoyable evening.” Draco waved his wand and slammed his office door shut, barely allowing Harry the space he needed to completely exit the cramped room.  
  
~*~  
  
Sometimes it was hard not to wake up remembering shagging Draco Malfoy.  
  
They  _had_  fit together uncommonly well. No sense in denial. Draco was good at sex, and good at pleasuring Harry with sex, and good at pleasuring himself while pleasuring Harry with sex.  
  
Mostly Harry remembered kissing him. Sucking his tongue into his own mouth and tasting the tequila shots they’d downed and knowing that Draco was just as aroused, just as desiring of falling into whichever of their beds showed up first, just as willing to let it be casual and then return to work the next week and ponder how useful such measures might prove to be in the future. At least Harry had pondered. There were benefits to be had with such connections, such release. Draco had agreed with him more than once over beers that their job was unusually devoid of sanity.  
  
There were days when Harry felt more than a little insane, lately.  
  
When he was at his most worn out, he found himself in the midst of thoughts about what Draco Malfoy’s body would feel like, pressed to his and with the spontaneous backdrop of some familiar office hallway. It was amazing how quickly those particular thoughts manifested; he never saw them coming. And he should have: they tended to happen when he saw the other man in the office— from far off as was Draco’s wont nowadays— walking briskly to whichever task he was set to accomplish or delegating work amongst whichever team members he was working alongside that day. Day after day went by, a week, and then another, and Draco’s midsection showed no signs of any sort of alteration, and the necessity for questions began to eat steadily into Harry’s subconscious until he was gritting his teeth and clenching his quills with whitening fingers.   
  
He began to practice, in front of the mirror at home, watching himself knot his tie (which would certainly come off or be destroyed before he returned home that evening, necessitating the purchase of yet another one), and unconsciously making the faces he assumed Draco would make in response.  
  
“So. Malfoy. What did you decide?”  
  
Too crass. He sounded like a bloody punk kid from the states.   
  
“Malf— Draco. I know it’s not my place, but I think I have a right to know what you decided.”  
  
True. And not crass. But Harry had a feeling he wouldn’t get that far in the real world, with Draco standing right in front of him glaring the words back down his throat.  
  
“Draco, how are you feeling?”  
  
No good; Malfoy would just feign innocence and bait him with ‘whatever do you mean’s until he screamed.  
  
“Draco, I have a right to know. Are you still pregnant?”  
  
Good way to get punched again.  
  
He went to work. He saw Draco from afar. He remained silent. Draco continued to not drop things off at his office personally, to not come by for any reason, and to not speak to him at all. Harry continued to wonder. To watch Draco in the halls and eye his midsection, and mouth his various mantras to himself with rising levels of vehemence. Draco Malfoy continued to never be on the same projects as Harry; he hardly ever seemed to leave the office except to exit cheerily on his way home while Harry struggled to keep the team organised between trips to various sites. How Draco was scoring all the in-office paperwork was beyond Harry. He had never appreciated the pay cut that came with it, but some days… he just wanted to sit  _down_.  
  
He went home and stood in front of the mirror, and convinced himself night after night that he’d found the right phrasing at last, only to find himself rebuffed by his own anxiety the next morning, standing there with his tie.  
  
Until one day he looked at himself in the mirror and realised mid-sentence that the entire endeavor was useless. Whatever had been done had been done a long time ago. He was doing nothing but weaving himself a fantasy of control.  
  
~*~  
  
Elisa Mebbles tugged Harry right off his track down the hall and eyebrow-wiggled him to a stop just out of earshot of the owner’s grandiose office. “Did you hear? Malfoy’s threatened Mr Helmsborough’s life!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Right after lunch. Harrison heard them shouting in Helm’s office. Malfoy refused to go to Greenwood Plains next week. And Helm said he would burn his contract with Fiendfyre! And then Malfoy threatened to Avada Kedavra Helm’s pet skrewt!”  
  
With a wistful eye-roll, Harry gave up all hope of getting his paperwork done before lunch. He turned to face Elisa head on. “Oh, is that what’s happened, then? I thought the fridge in the breakroom just broke down.”  
  
“You are impossible, Harry!” Elisa admonished with a waggled finger. “Goodness, you wouldn’t know a thing that’s going on if not for me!”  
  
He shared a laugh with her, thinking that he could have done without the necessary ‘news’ of poxxed vampires in Manchester the previous week, and Helm’s horrid case of Skibblelumps the month prior. Both of which had turned out to be absolute bollocks.   
  
~*~  
  
He arrived at work almost two weeks later to the day, to discover that Draco Malfoy’s shouting voice had the capacity to fill the entire building, even from inside Helm’s office.  
  
“Malfoy’s just quit,” Elisa said matter-of-factly, leaning against the wall with her thin arms crossed.  
  
 _“What?”_  Harry felt his jaw drop open; he couldn’t help it.  
  
“Oh, yes. Not two minutes ago.”  
  
Harry’s stomach flopped alarmingly downward, and then swung there, threatening to upturn itself like a wobbly bucket. “What… Did he say… Why?”  
  
“Well, he demanded a raise. But you know Helm. It wasn’t even an atrocious amount to ask for. You know, I might just quit myself if this continues; Malfoy’s a good curse-breaker, Helm is going to suffer for this—”  
  
“But…” It still wouldn’t re-order itself.  _“Why?”_  
  
“Well, he’s been off lately, hasn’t he?  _And_  he’s been skiving off field jobs, the bastard. Personally, I think Malfoy’s putting one over on the super, but then again, if the super deserves it—”  
  
Harry cut her off before she could get going. His stomach still felt squished. “Elisa! Are you putting one over on _me?_ ”  
  
She turned to him with offended eyes. “Would I do that to you, Harry? Honestly…”  
  
Harry fought the urge to go for her throat. “No way,” he said firmly. “I don’t believe you. He can’t be quitting.”  
  
“Then, as I told you, I fucking quit!” Draco’s voice exploded just down the hall. Harry froze. The muted crack of Apparition followed almost immediately, leaving nothing but an ominous silence behind.  
  
Elisa was smirking at him. Harry scowled back, and slammed his way into his office before he gave in and kicked a wall.  
  
~*~  
  
It took nearly two days for Harry to realise the truth of the matter.  
  
Draco’s office door remained closed, the view through the windows to the hallway empty, his desk devoid of its usual paraphernalia, his walls blank of any blueprints and maps. The outer window drapes remained open, baring the empty room to the harsh light of the days that passed.   
  
It was the lack of Draco himself that finally slugged Harry hard in the stomach. His day afterward was miserable: his head became a dull mass of aching that finally sent him home— it was so bad that he didn’t even care about using up the meager amount of sick leave he had acquired— and then his flat was just… a little too empty. Harry swigged back a stale beer in the middle of his kitchen and thought briefly about clubs and half-clothed dancing men. And relinquished the thought with a grimace. Gods, he didn’t want  _that_.   
  
He wanted an explanation. He wanted a quick fix. He wanted normality, and he hadn’t had that for at least three months. Not since that night in Draco’s bed. He just hadn’t known that he was digging his own hole already that night. All in good time, all in good time.  
  
Bloody bollocksing shite. Had Draco really quit?   
  
It was plainly the truth when the week ended itself with no sign of any dream-waking. Draco Malfoy was well and truly gone. The ugly thing was that Harry was just beginning to realise that he didn’t really have a way of contacting Draco. An owl, maybe, except he didn’t have his own owl anymore. Draco’s flat was warded and Unplottable, as were all of his co-workers’ homes. There was no way to locate the man if he didn’t want to be found, and if he’d wanted Harry to know anything about where he was going…  
  
Well. He would have told him flat out, wouldn’t he have?  
  
Harry spent Friday night cursing, of all things, his own lack of fatherhood, and lost chances and botched one-night-stands and just… idiocy in general. It was so, so meaningless and aggravating: there was absolutely nothing he could do about the fact that he would have wanted something more out of this, that he would have provided if he’d needed to, that he’d— But he couldn’t now. And there was nothing he could do to change that.  
  
Around midnight, the three crisp bangs on the door jagged Harry out of his depressed musings. He got up off the couch and made for the front door on bare feet, too mentally exhausted to care about why someone would come knocking at such an hour.  
  
It was Draco Malfoy. On his doorstep, looking agitated with the entire situation. Harry blinked a couple times before he accepted his new reality.  
  
“Malfoy,” he forced out at last. The other man’s eyes snapped up and fixed on his. Draco scowled a bit and reached up with one hand, leaning very slightly on the door frame.  
  
“Potter,” Draco started, and then stopped and licked his lips. His fingers drummed on the doorjamb. “It seems I’m out of a job.”  
  
Harry couldn’t stop the frown; it was a bit like being kicked in the side, the confirmation of such a ridiculous rumour. At least, he’d thought it ridiculous. “Yeah. I heard.”  
  
Draco’s flicked glance might have been for the sharpness in Harry’s words. Or not. “Bloody gossips,” the blond muttered, and Harry lost the flimsy control he’d had over his frustration.   
  
Foiled excuses to see Draco daily, the loss of competency on his team as a whole, the end of an era, for crying out loud— Harry very nearly snapped it into Draco’s face: “Why the hell would you  _quit?_  Just— quit!”  
  
Draco’s brows went fiercely together. “Because I’m starting to  _show_ ,” he snarled, and his hands wrenched the cloak free and the jumper off, and tugged his shirt taut about his middle.  
  
And there it was.  
  
Harry stared.   
  
He wasn’t sure how long— a small, rounded hump just near Draco’s trouser line— but it must have been a while, because Draco’s voice came again, much less steadily and beginning to shake.  
  
“…couldn’t work for them. They’d see, there’s no way to— hide it. And how the fuck do you think they’d respond? How long would it take them to— The press, Potter— I would have had to explain eventually, you know, why I can’t be in the line of fire, they were starting to demand answers, and it—”  
  
He stopped, just in time for Harry’s mouth to open of its own accord.  
  
“You kept it,” he said softly.  
  
He could only stare at that tiny mound, but Draco’s shrug was plain and hunchy. “I kept  _her_. And she’s not all mine.”  
  
Her. Oh Godric. Harry let himself stop breathing, just a soft whoosh and then nothing. A girl. And… big enough to show. She was growing. And then what Draco was really getting at struck him and Harry raised his head. “Draco, just… I know she’s mine.”  
  
“Potter…” Draco’s grey eyes were pleading, and hating it. “I can’t afford my flat. Had to… give it up. I’m out in a week.”  
  
It occurred to Harry very abruptly that his front door was still open, and Draco was explaining all of this out on his doorstep without even seeming to care much about that fact. He stepped back unsteadily and gestured for the other man to enter. Draco glared at him, and then pushed into the flat. Harry shut the door behind him and faced his sitting room and his new world view. “You’re being evicted.”  
  
“I’m leaving before it comes to that,” Draco corrected. His jaw firmed itself into a hard line. Harry’s eyes strayed downward, but there was nothing but loose shirt fabric. Still…  
  
 _“Potter,”_  Draco almost snarled. How long he’d been snarling at Harry’s lack of attention could not be guessed. “Do  _not_  make me explain it to you. For the love of the Founders, please.”  
  
And Harry caught on again. And exhaled. “I get it. Draco.” He had to pause then and collect his nerves. “This is… what you want?”  
  
Draco shrugged stiffly. “I hardly think that comes into it. It is what it is.”  
  
He, Harry Potter, barely made enough to take care of himself. He worked ungodly hours already, and he barely made payments, and he was well-fed, but only because he was frugal, and he really, really didn’t want to dig into his parents’ money again already, he’d done enough of that as it was— Harry looked around his sitting room, taking in the simplicity of it all, the ‘himness.’ And straightened his shoulders.   
  
“You can stay here for as long as you need to.”  
  
~*~  
  
It wasn’t the best of arrangements.   
  
Harry wasn’t used to living with another person. Hells, that was bloody well why he’d broken up with Ginny years back, wasn’t it? Couldn’t quite make sense of the aggravation of having to share space, but then, part of that was also probably to do with the fact that he was into men by that time. Still, Harry didn’t do roommates, not when work wore him to the point of furious explosion, and his roommate of non-choice was less than agreeable about the situation himself.  
  
At least Draco had his own space. The sitting room was easy to cordon off with spells, the couch simple enough to turn into a proper bed. Harry took a good two weeks to get used to being deprived of a sitting room upon arrival home at night. Draco’s presence was both a blessing and a curse; a blessing in that Harry could not shake the sense of relief he felt, and a curse in that the man was every bit as annoying as he’d always been. Only now they danced around each other in two rooms and a bath.  
  
Harry’s childish wistfulness was the first thing to go: he could barely imagine that one night anymore. It seemed too far removed from the man living in his sitting room, and the disagreeableness of the two of them together, and the fact that— well, everything. He’d long imagined what another night with Draco Malfoy would feel like. But he just couldn’t see it anymore.  
  
They had plenty to discuss anyway, without adding misplaced notions of intimacy to the tortured mix.  
  
“Caryn.”  
  
“Absolutely not, Potter. You are out of your imbecilic mind.”  
  
“Says he who insists upon Matilda.”  
  
Draco sniffed, slouching down just and inch or so further in his chair. “Happens to be a regal name. Of which you’ve no concept anyway.”  
  
Harry snorted. “I don’t want a daughter with a regal name. I want a daughter who isn’t going to be the laughing stock of an entire infants’ school class.”  
  
“Preposterous. I’ll be the one selecting her education. And the school I choose wouldn’t dare.”  
  
“We’re not naming her Matilda.”  
  
“You’re lucky I’m giving you any say at all.”  
  
Harry glared for all of two seconds before leaning back in his chair and lowering his chin. “Harriet.”  
  
Draco shot up, lips poisonously thin. “No child that comes out of  _this_  body will ever be named after  _you_. Why do you even suggest such idiocy?”  
  
Harry smirked. “Because it pisses you off.”  
  
Draco’s answer was silent and decisively offensive.  
  
~*~  
  
Harry got in from work late on Wednesday, and made it all the way to his front door before realising that he had neglected the bread, which meant he had no outsides for his future sandwiches, which meant he would have to fork over money for take-away lunch again tomorrow, and fuck it all, but he was so tired, and he really wasn’t looking forward to sharing another silent night with his appropriated flatmate.  
  
It hadn’t taken Draco long to comment on the lack of food in the fridge. So what if Harry was used to the survival of one and not three? He didn’t need all that much, and he didn’t like shopping anyway, and gods almighty, they weren’t allowed to have arguments over money when they weren’t even a couple! “Fucking hell,” Harry snapped to himself, and his mood spiralled completely right there on his front doorstep, making him want to strike the door like a five-year-old in the midst of a tantrum, and just yell and scream at Draco Malfoy for making it all so very possible to be going grey before thirty. He’d survived a war, for crying out loud, and he didn’t have a grey hair to his name for all that, but he was damn well going to get them now because of some stupid curse and an equally stupid boss, who was actually not stupid enough to slack off on royally screwing his employees over, and why couldn’t Malfoy just go back to  _work?_  
  
Founders, he didn’t want to be a father anymore, and definitely not a single one. Life was a disappointment, everything was just a fucking disappointment, and he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but not this, not this right now or in this form, or—  
  
“Malfoy,” Harry gritted out, unlocking the door with a jerk of his hand and shoving it open. “I think I’ve bent over backward, and now it’s—”  
  
His first thought was that Draco had actually been crying.   
  
The second was that he, Harry, was sorry for walking into his own house.  
  
He stopped abruptly in the doorway, uncertain what to do. Draco had turned immediately away, there on his bed-née-couch, shoulders hunched and head down. He was wearing a loose shirt that draped his lean frame, and his hair was mussed. Perhaps he’d been sleeping. Or trying to… Harry drew a deep breath and let it out. Trying to sleep. Staring at a wall with nothing to block the truth of his predicament.  
  
“Are you alright?” he asked softly, even as he understood what a bad idea the question was.  
  
“I’m fine,” Draco snapped. “Gods, what do you want now, Potter? Shall I go down to the shop again for mayonnaise? Or maybe you’d like to question me about where I’ve stuck the towels this time?”  
  
A sore subject. Draco had put half of them in the wrong place four nights ago, leaving Harry shivering in the bathroom post-shower, at half-five in the morning, an event that had brought on the worst mood Harry had ever been in. It had lasted an entire day. And Draco, in his immediate defensiveness, had not been the best catalyst when Harry returned home at last. They were still recovering from that shouting match, if it could be termed ‘recovering.’  
  
“No,” Harry said, feeling very uninspired. He opened his mouth and found nothing else forthcoming, and settled for “no,” again. Draco’s mouth bent into a frown.   
  
“I’m tired, Potter. Please kindly shut up so I may go back to the sleep from which you woke me.” With that, Draco made a great show of fluffing his pillows, straightening his blankets, and lying down, his back to Harry and the door, which was still open.  
  
Harry stood there for a few seconds more, and then shut the door, toed off his shoes very quietly, and tiptoed down the hallway into his bedroom. Suddenly he wasn’t all that hungry anymore.

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

“Let me get this straight. You’re going to the manor?”  
  
Draco’s eyes narrowed over his cup of tea. “I believe that was the information I  _just_  imparted. Hearing going already, Potter?”  
  
Harry snorted. “Hardly. I just have my doubts about the endeavor in general.”  
  
Draco put his mug down with a clunk. He stared at Harry icily. “Well, bravo. And cheers for your most eloquent analysis of the situation. Which you have no right to analyse anyway. I’ll thank you to stay out of my business.”  
  
Harry had a hard time biting back the irritation. He pushed the cutlery drawer closed— it was ajar— to keep himself from retaliating. “Well, bully for you,” he finally snapped anyway. “Have fun visiting your dear parents. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”  
  
“Frankly, I don’t care if they’re thrilled. I only care if they’re generous.” Draco finished his tea and stood up from the table, giving Harry a condescending look. “Really, Harry. You underestimate my family’s ties to each other. We’re not aberrant just because you’ve decided it’s so.”  
  
It felt so very necessary to push any button he could find, right at that moment. “I think you should take me along,” Harry said loftily, and if Draco had still been holding his tea, he would have spluttered it.  
  
“You,” Draco said in a low tone, “are an idiot. I’ll not let you anywhere near my ancestral home. It’s going to be interesting enough with just me there.”  
  
“You mean the two of you.” Harry pointed to Draco’s belly and got a hateful glare for his trouble.  
  
“ _You_  are barely scraping by as it is, Potter. Salazar knows how you’ve managed to waste your appropriated Wizarding fortune already. I’ve got money coming, and I intend to support my… child.” Draco’s face flickered strangely, and then he shrugged it away. “My parents have a right to know about their future grandchild. And they have a right to hear about it without  _you_  in their home making them murderous.”  
  
“Hmm,” Harry murmured doubtfully around his own tea. “So when you get back, we can discuss how to avoid their wrath, yeah?”  
  
“Fuck off, Potter.”  
  
Harry grinned widely.  
  
~*~  
  
The door shut, but the foyer remained quiet. Harry lay down his paper slowly, ears pricked. He thought he might hear footsteps. But there was nothing.  
  
Five seconds ticked loudly past; Harry rose from his chair, the soft scrape now ominous. He headed for the archway separating kitchen from sitting room.  
  
Draco had made it onto the again-couch, quietly over the room’s various rugs. He was sitting, leaning over with his elbows resting on his knees and his face in his hands. His shoulders rose and fell weakly under the crisp white shirt he wore. Harry watched. All inklings of ‘should’ve let me come, I told you’ melted out of him like ghosts. The snide satisfaction slipped away alongside them.  
  
“No good?” he said at last, softly.  
  
Draco’s head came up in slow motion. And it should have been the obvious conclusion, but the redness of his eyes startled Harry, the blotchiness of his cheeks. There was no hatred there, but not because it didn’t exist. It had been drowned. Died a quiet death as loss rushed into its place. Draco shook his head wordlessly and looked away.  
  
Harry wet his lips, and still had trouble voicing any sound. “What did they say?”  
  
Draco didn’t seem to register that he was there in a corporeal sense. He stared straight ahead, eyes as dull as dust. “Before or after the news?”  
  
Harry felt the sharp edge on the air. “After,” he said quietly.  
  
“Turns out they still hate you.” Draco grimaced. “They said… Well. Not to come back.”  
  
“I’m sorry, Draco.”  
  
Draco’s eyes closed. “Shut up, Harry,” he whispered.  
  
Harry did not move for several seconds. And then he came forward as if drawn, tugged toward the couch and its occupant. He reached Draco’s side, their bare toe-tips touching in the lush rug, Draco’s toes warm and slender beneath Harry’s own. He lifted his hand and cupped one soft cheek.  
  
Draco looked up and Harry’s fingers slid down to his chin. Caressed. He knelt on his knees, very slowly. Draco turned his head away, pained, holding the fabric of Harry’s shirt just by his shoulder, as if to stop him.  
  
But Harry kept going, until he was leaning forward, until his lips were against Draco’s and they were entirely too close to each other. He kissed Draco slowly, thoroughly. Gently. Missing nothing and nowhere, not tongue or lips.   
  
Draco let out a sound and gripped Harry’s shirt, and at the same time tried to snatch breath. Harry let him breathe once, and spoke once: “Draco, we’ll make it through. We’ll manage.”  
  
Draco’s eyes met his for a long, still instant. His fingers clenched around Harry’s shirt, and Harry felt the slightest of tugs.  
  
He pressed Draco down gently on his back on the couch, until he could feel the small, firm roundness of the man’s belly against his own. Strange. His. Or theirs— He kissed Draco harder, and suddenly a hole opened up inside him that had no end, but the thing that could fill it anyway was right before him.  
  
It wasn’t exactly slow. Draco’s gasps were harsh and graceless long before the end. Their clothes never quite made it off. Harry would feel the ghost of fingers pressed against his hips for hours after, and the couch creaked loudly as if it would shatter and tumble into a heap at any moment.  
  
But some of the loss had been wiped from Draco’s sweaty face when Harry kissed it afterward, lying against him and feeling Draco’s chest heave under his. Draco turned his head with a tired sigh and swallowed. His hand still lingered in Harry’s hair, warm and relaxed.  
  
~*~  
  
It was the difference of waking up next to a warm body that did it.  
  
Draco was very naked, very asleep and very curled on his side, one hand draping down across a gentle bulge that could just as easily have been a stomach relaxed in sleep. Harry found himself fearfully short of breath within ten seconds: how different it felt from being under a blanket with nothing but his own body heat, compared to feeling Draco’s heat there too. How sorely he felt that difference, felt how much he didn’t want to go back to the way it had been before.  
  
And then he was  _painfully_  short of breath at the arrival of a heavy, ominous emotion that wrenched his innards as it flew in and then out of him before he could name it. He nearly caught hold of it when he looked down at Draco’s calm face.  
  
Right then, he knew that, even if he wasn’t sure he could say it aloud to Draco himself, he didn’t want Draco on the couch anymore. The feeling lasted through breakfast, and then all the way through his long work day, holed up in his office.  
  
Thus it was like a breeze cooling his face to come back into his bedroom that night and find Draco sitting up in his bed as if he’d always been there, a woven throw tucked over bent knees. The window was open and there was indeed a breeze blowing through; Draco’s eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell in steady huffs.  
  
Harry hesitated at the door, and then made his way silently across to his dresser and proceeded to divest himself of his work clothing. He’d re-hung his shirt, spelled his trousers free of wrinkles again, and donned the sweat pants he wore to bed before he realised— some sixth sense— that Draco was watching him. He found it a little too hard to turn around and meet that gaze; instead he busied himself with the necessities of turning off lights, turning on lamps, and stowing his wand in its usual safe place. The closet door had to be shut. His shoes had to be arranged just so in the corner. And then there was the matter of getting into his bed, and Draco was still staring at him.  
  
It wasn’t a penetrating stare. Just an aware one. Draco’s eyes had opened, and his hands had risen to clasp loosely around his raised knees. Harry wondered exactly what words Draco thought he was in the midst of choosing. Something to expedite the trip back to the couch perhaps, the awkwardness that surely must follow what had always, always been awkward.  
  
Harry left his dresser at last, having run out of things to do. He cast the usual wandless securing spells, locked up the flat for the night with a wave of his hand, made sure the windows were cracked, and left the door to the hallway open. Draco’s eyes tracked him across the room warily. At last, Harry made for the large bed, and watched Draco watch him approach.  
  
Harry gestured as he crawled into the bed on the empty side. “Should use the blankets.”  
  
Silence. Then a little snort. Draco tucked his body close to the head of the bed and manoeuvred the duvet out from under himself. Harry scooted closer in the ensuing shuffle, and was completely at fault for the intimacy of their positions when Draco finally settled back with a contained sigh.  
  
It could have started with kissing again. But it didn’t; it started with Harry’s hand on Draco’s belly, stroking lazily up and down over bare skin.  
  
~*~  
  
“Mira.”  
  
“No way.”  
  
“You have no taste, Potter.”  
  
“Amanda.”  
  
“And the verdict is in: you are  _still_  the most inept human being I’ve ever met.”  
  
~*~  
  
Shagging regularly again had a very nice feel to it.  
  
Harry’d wondered if it would feel strange to have sex with a pregnant person. But the knowledge that it was  _his_ baby inside his lover’s body was far more tender an idea than he’d anticipated. Draco felt both exceptionally fragile and unbreakable to him, a sense that was somewhat belied by the other man’s absolute willingness to engage in all sorts of affirmations of their renewed physical connection.  
  
Often enough, Harry found himself glad to simply hold Draco, to kiss his mouth for extended periods of time and just  _know_.  
  
Draco took to the name Mira as if there had never been any other on either of their lists. It annoyed Harry, the sound of it, the sugar-sweet first syllable and the unfinished second. Like someone trying to pronounce ‘mirror’ and losing interest halfway through. There was no way he was letting a child of his fall under the weight of potential childish cruelty, not when he could help it by choosing something like Annie or Jillian. It was an abrasive-enough subject to wake him fully into an argument at any time of the night or day. And Draco certainly chose any time to put his own foot down, as it were.  
  
The immense change that was approaching was ever-present, but not incapacitating, as such a change could be expected to be. Draco’s stomach got larger— Harry saw it everyday— and the steadiness of its growth was comforting, in a way. Not shocking, not a constant blow to the nerves—  _Oh gods, what am I going to do with a baby? What on earth—?_  
  
Instead, it was like easing into a hot bath. Sometimes Harry felt very nearly immersed.  
  
The hardest thing was watching Draco’s eyes go a bit hollow as he sat at the table and eyed Harry putting away groceries and household items, tapping his long fingers absently on the tabletop and just… staring. Money, without Draco’s former paycheck to add to it, was definitely becoming an issue.  
  
So Harry finally made the decision he’d been avoiding.  
  
~*~  
  
“Good afternoon, Mr Potter,” the goblin said with a very toothy smile. “How may I assist you?”  
  
“I’d like to take out some Galleons,” Harry said calmly. “And I’d like to unseal my parents’ vault.”  
  
The goblin looked at him askance. “As is our policy, I must inform you that the vault in question has been sealed for five years. According to your contract, it is set to mature in two years’ time. You will lose any and all accumulated interest from this day on, and there will be a fee involved in order to open the vault before the ordained period.”  
  
“I’ll pay it,” Harry answered.  
  
The goblin nodded briskly. “Very well, Mr Potter. If you will please follow me.”  
  
He took his keys and stepped away from the counter. The ornate golden grate for customer entry clicked open with a flick of one clawed hand. Harry entered and followed the goblin beyond into the vault passageways.  
  
~*~  
  
Three years after the death of Voldemort, Harry had walked through the front doors of Gringott’s, intent upon putting his own money out of his reach.  
  
It was not as difficult as he’d thought to open another vault, and then promptly seal it with three-quarters of his parents’ fortune still inside. Not exactly uncommon, actually, as the goblins informed him. When that amount of Galleons was untouchable, the goblin said, already rubbing his hands, the percentage of interest could be allowed to go much, much higher, give or take a few years.  
  
Harry chose seven.  
  
It took less than four months after the closing of his vault for Ginny Weasley to pick up her things and go her way. The money didn’t have much to do with it, truthfully; it was part and parcel, of course— how could it not be, when Ginny, so used to having threadbare coffers, took the offered advantage of a few extra Galleons with her famous boyfriend? Harry couldn’t exactly blame her. He was freshly free of the constant threat to his life; he’d spent more than a few Galleons himself those first couple of years, just reminding himself that he was alive.   
  
It was staring at the ominous downward fall of his account that finally, finally drove him first to tearing out his hair, then to sleepless nights followed by argumentative days, and then to Gringott’s with intent to keep himself from his own funds before he purchased an adulthood of pennilessness.  
  
Perhaps it was a little paranoid, when he had thousands and thousands of Galleons left. But Harry had felt better with the structure of the sealed account— the imposed limitations, one might say— and in the end, that helped him sleep better at night. That alone was worth all the money he had. And he felt a sense of…accomplishment, knowing it was his hard work that was keeping him clothed and fed and housed from then on.  
  
He didn’t tell Draco about opening the vault immediately. For a week or two afterward, Harry still had to work to convince himself that he’d done the right thing. After all, wasn’t this exactly the sort of emergent situation that such savings were for?  
  
It took him nearly a month to go back to Gringott’s and open a third vault, where he set aside a percentage of the original fortune yet again, and sealed it away, because surely the future would carry urgent situations of its own.  
  
~*~  
  
Draco rolled over with a groan, settling as much on his stomach as he could manage and letting out a long sigh. Harry stopped midway into his right shoe.   
  
“That position can’t be good for you. Or her.”  
  
“Shove it, Harry,” Draco muttered. “We’re fine.”  
  
Harry frowned, and went back to lacing his trainers. “Maybe you should see a Healer. It’s been a while.”  
  
Draco turned one unamused eye on Harry. “What makes you think I haven’t been seeing a Healer?”  
  
Harry thought about it, and then shrugged. “Never seen you go.”  
  
“Oh, so I have no interest in taking care of the baby, is that it?” Draco rolled over again with visible effort and sat up, leaning on both arms. “You don’t trust me to bother? Fine. Then  _you_  do it, if it’s so worrisome to you. See a Healer of your own. Give them all the sordid details of my life all over again, my fall from grace and our joint drunken fall from sense, for no good reason whatsoever. Tell them you don’t trust me. I might just cut my wrists out of boredom and kill the baby, yeah? Tell them I need emotional guidance, and I can’t afford to pay just yet, or possibly ever, and then tell them who you are. They ought to give you a discounted rate for the privilege of ensuring the health of the saviour baby.”  
  
Harry yanked his sweatshirt off the closet door moodily. “Okay, I’m not talking to you right now. Squash the baby, I don’t care.”  
  
“Good,” Draco snarled. “Leave me alone to neglect myself in peace, since you’re so determined that’s what I’m doing.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and didn’t respond, but slammed the door for good measure on his way out for a morning run.  
  
~*~  
  
“Oh, Harry…”  
  
“If you suggest Mira one more time, I’m going to the newspapers.”  
  
“Mira.”  
  
“You are a stubborn arse.”  
  
“And you can’t bluff to save your life.”  
  
~*~  
  
Harry stood, ratty t-shirt draping comfortably over his shoulders, with his hands on his hips. The tiny window in the hall’s closet was more of a shabby skylight, but it filtered clean sunlight over the shelves and their load of boxes.  
  
“Take some work,” he murmured. The sunlight made the white walls glow.  
  
It was his moving closet, as he called it: all the empty boxes and bags, a few items left packed due to sheer lack of necessity. He’d always kept the boxes, as if one day he’d up and decide he had to leave the flat. Go elsewhere.  
  
It was the only space even remotely big enough.  
  
“Skylight stays,” he said with a matter-of-fact nod, and then felt lighter, as if he’d accomplished part of something he’d been meaning to get done for some time. It would be quite homey, with the shelves knocked out and the walls magically extended. It needn’t be large, and there was space for a second window overlooking the tree-lined street outside. After all, it needed plenty of light. If it was to be Mira’s room—  
  
“Oh, Merlin.” Harry snorted and shook his head. Bloody name.  
  
He turned his attention back to the tiny closet, already envisioning new dimensions.  
  
~*~  
  
In the middle of the street, Diagon’s stores choked with shoppers, Draco righted himself from the shove, his feet turning on the cobblestones. His layered robes billowed; he was unexpectedly far away from Harry. The older man’s face— Draco’s antagonist’s— was twisted with aged grief, his thin arm pushing a girl roughly out of his way.   
  
His dark wand was a sharp stab through frosty morning air.  
  
“Malfoy,” he hissed, “you filthy, murdering—”  
  
Draco’s eyes went wide, his left hand rising and empty. “No, I never touched y—”  
  
“Of course you did!” The man’s voice broke frenziedly. “You and your wife!”  
  
“Wait, I’m not—”  
  
 _“Crucio!”_  Red and hot, hitting Draco point blank in the chest. Draco dropped where he stood, face clenched. His wand clattered from his robe pocket to the street.  
  
Harry ran, too late, covering such a small, huge distance. “Expelliarmus!” The blast sent the man off his feet and into the wall of Eyelops hard enough to leave him a limp, pitiful heap, unmoving on the ground.  
  
Only, pity was the farthest thing from Harry’s mind.  
  
~*~  
  
Cruciatus still riddled Draco’s hands, leaving them two shaking, grasping curls of fingers. Harry could feel their tremble as he struggled to hold onto them. The Healer was still whispering stabilising spells, her face a grimace and her wand pointed at Draco’s neck.   
  
“How far along is he?” she asked shortly. Harry allowed himself a second to stare at her, startled by the tone.  
  
“Six months. And a week.” Draco’s hand jerked and Harry squeezed it reflexively. “Everything has been fine.”  
  
She made a dismissive sound and checked Draco’s eyes, then his pulse. Draco arched off the bed, groaning, and she straightened. “You’re the other father?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
The frown on her face was hardly comforting. She began to wave her wand over Draco’s torso in sweeps. “Lucia. Prepare a birthing room.”  
  
The nurse turned in mid-stride and blinked. “A birthing room? But—”  
  
“ _Now_ , Lucia?” the Healer shot back, and the nurse hurried off.  
  
Draco’s hands shivered and clutched at his midsection. “Harry—” he gasped. “No. No, no, no, no—”  
  
A single tear worked its way down Draco’s ashen cheek.  
  
The Healer sedated him with a sudden, decisive flick of her wand, and Draco slumped back onto the bed, as heavy as a wooden doll, his eyes dull and half-lidded. Harry could not remember a worse sight.  
  
“He’s gone into labor, Mr Potter,” the Healer said in a clipped voice. “The baby may have to come out.”  
  
Harry grabbed her arm. “Too early,” he hissed, but she shook him off.  
  
“I am well aware of that,” she snapped. “Perhaps you’d like to lose them both instead?”  
  
Harry’s mind tried to throw itself down into darkness, and he froze. Couldn’t think about the terrible consequences supported by that statement.  
  
The Healer eyed him wordlessly as her wand wove over Draco’s still form. She pursed her lips. “We’ll do our best to stop the birth, Mr Potter. It’s best if you find a seat in the waiting room. I will tell you the first news I have.”  
  
Harry couldn’t nod. He couldn’t speak. She hustled him to the door and through it, and before he could even attempt to summon some sort of argument, she closed it behind him.  
  
~*~  
  
She came out within an hour, wandless and looking wearier than when Harry’d left. Nonetheless, her eyes found him immediately. She gestured, giving a curt nod. “Mr Potter.”  
  
Harry rose on legs that wobbled. “Is he— Are they—?”  
  
“The Cruciatus is gone. Draco Malfoy is resting as comfortably as can be expected. The baby—”  
  
Harry cut her off. “Did he give birth?”  
  
“We’ve stopped it,” she said, face drawn and tired. “For now.”  
  
“Is he—”  
  
“On bed rest,” she snapped. And strode forward, pointing at Harry with one finger. “You must understand the implications of this directive. He doesn’t get up for anything that you cannot take care of with a spell. He eats, drinks, sleeps, and lies awake  _in bed_. It’s a wonder he hasn’t already given birth. That baby’s not ready to join us here, not for another month at least, and I would like to keep it that way.”  
  
Harry swallowed in the sudden silence. “Alright,” nodding.  
  
She made for him again, and Harry backed up, but this time the malice was absent from her voice. It left Harry unprepared for her actual words. “You must keep him still. You don’t know how hard it will be, and believe me, it will be hard. I don’t want to keep him here; much too stressful a place. And frankly, we don’t need the inevitable media scourge. He needs to be at home, and at home, you, Mr Potter, are it.”  
  
Harry didn’t need to ask after the ‘it.’ She launched right into ‘it’ for him. “He is going to need care all day, and most of the night. He will inevitably try to get up and function for himself. You cannot let him, not unless you want to induce labor again. You will not be able to bind him to the bed, because that sort of magic will interfere with the spells inhibiting the birth. The best thing I can suggest is to dump any thoughts of yourself at the door— and this goes for both of you— and think of the child. She doesn’t need to be born this early.”  
  
She rolled her shoulders back and drew what sounded like a cleansing breath. Harry wondered fleetingly if she found this sort of thing difficult to say. “Now. I’ve got to go and lay down the law for him when he wakes. Which should be in a few minutes. I will provide you with lists of acceptable and unacceptable activities. Please have a seat until I return.”  
  
Harry sat. The Healer left.   
  
~*~  
  
 _“Malfoy Heir Hospitalised After Brutal Attack  
  
Draco Lucius Malfoy, only child of the infamous Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, was rushed to St. Mungo’s yesterday afternoon after being vengefully attacked in the streets of Diagon Alley. The name of his attacker has yet to be revealed, but sources indicate that the man in question cited a personal injury done to him by Draco Malfoy himself.  
  
It is not difficult for this reporter to believe it; Draco Malfoy has long had his own infamy for his secretive activities in the recently ended war. Witnesses all have the same story: the attack was unprovoked, in the middle of a street full of schoolchildren, and— believe it or not— in the presence of Harry James Potter, the famed Boy Who Lived. But one must wonder whether such an attack was truly unprovoked, given the Malfoy family’s personal history.  
  
St. Mungo’s remains mum on the subject, but the extent of Malfoy’s injuries is not hard to imagine. Rumour has it that the victim is catatonic, suffering at the hands of anything from burns to mental breakdown. There has been no word from the Malfoy family. As for Harry Potter, instrumental once again in saving the day, the Wizarding world must question the wisdom of interfering in what was obviously a likely-deserved revenge gone wrong. More details as they surface—”_  
  
Not Rita Skeeter’s best, by any means. But Harry wasn’t about to argue. The complete lack of connection in certain areas was, as the Muggles said, a bullet most fortuitously dodged, for both of them.   
  
~*~  
  
It was almost a week before they were allowed home.   
  
Harry even walked carefully through the bedroom— his own; he couldn’t picture Draco on the couch-bed, even if it was a perfectly serviceable bed— tiptoeing over the carpet in lieu of silencing charms. He couldn’t use them; they were on the list of dangerous spells that St Mungo’s had provided, though not because of any interference with Draco’s anti-birthing magic. The Healer had been very specific: under no circumstances was Draco ever to be in the vicinity of a silencing spell. The chances of him needing help and being unable to get it were too great.  
  
The thought kept Harry up into the deep night, lying next to Draco as motionlessly as possible and watching the light crawl over the ceiling as the hours ticked by.  
  
It was almost too easy to keep Draco in bed for the first two weeks. It was just this side of frightening, watching the other man curl his fingers repeatedly into the sheets beneath them, the only part of his body that moved. He didn’t say much, and he didn’t touch his abdomen, which was a greater behavioural change than Harry was ready for. Draco had always touched his own belly, whether consciously or unconsciously, especially recently. He liked to be touched. When they had sex, he inched Harry’s hand steadily over the rounded swell of his stomach, almost as if he didn’t even realise he was doing it. The baby moved quite a bit; Harry never failed to be startled by it, and he wasn’t the one feeling it from the inside.  
  
He wondered, watching Draco as he stared upward from the bed, if the movement inside had changed. If he could still feel her, or— Harry tried to shake the thought away, but it formed anyway: If he couldn’t feel her anymore.  
  
Some days— the days Harry had off— they just rested there together, not saying a word.  
  
In the third week, Draco’s mood changed abruptly from listless to infuriated. And yet, he made little effort to go against Harry’s directives. Harry had planned ahead, had come on strongly, had nearly had his head chewed off… but had not had to wrestle Draco down onto the bed again. He’d just had to leave the room.  
  
There was little he could say to his lover that did not bear the risk of anger in response. Draco walked on careful steps to and from the loo, allowing the support of Harry’s arm under his shoulder without protest. But getting back into bed again loosed the floodgates, and then Harry got to hear about everything that could possibly bother a person who never set foot outside anymore. And all the while, Draco did not lay a hand on his own stomach, even though Harry did, even though he laid his ear there one night when he just couldn’t keep his nervousness in check anymore. He  _had_  to hear. Draco let him with nary a blink, just watching him from quiet grey eyes. The baby’s movement, thankfully, had not seemed different in the slightest, at least not to Harry’s ear. His own heartbeat was almost too heavy sometimes to feel anything.  
  
~*~  
  
The wind brushed the edge of the curtain up and over the sill until it fluttered against the bedside lamp and let cool moonlight into the room. The sounds of Muggle traffic outside were muted but present. Harry lay on his back on his side of the bed, arms under his head, feeling just on the verge of being too cold, but not yet there.   
  
He fancied he could almost feel it when Draco blinked, it was so still in the room.  
  
“What do you think about Anissa?” he asked softly.  
  
Draco made a small movement, perhaps a shift of his shoulders over the sheets. “I don’t mind it, if that’s what you mean.”  
  
Harry shrugged. He didn’t want a name that one of them ‘didn’t mind.’ “Your turn,” he answered, in lieu of something else.  
  
This time Draco did not move. “Nora has a pleasing sound.”  
  
“Yeah,” Harry agreed. Draco said nothing else, but Harry interpreted the pause anyway. “But not quite right?”  
  
This time Draco was the one who shrugged.  
  
Harry rolled over and let his eyes fall on the shadowy rise of his lover’s abdomen against the room’s faint light. It felt monumental, deciding the fate of the being inside, here in the middle of the night in a breeze-filled room. If the baby had been a boy, would this have been easier?  
  
No. They still would not have resorted to fathers’ names, just as they had stayed away from mothers’.  
  
“You can touch,” Draco intoned simply, not looking over at Harry. Harry lifted a hand and set it down gently on the curve of Draco’s belly. The nameless baby inside fussed about slowly, as if turning over.   
  
“Beth,” Harry murmured.  
  
“Mira,” Draco returned tonelessly.  
  
Harry stayed silent for a moment before scooting closer to Draco, letting their bodies touch.  
  
Draco made a small sound somewhat like a snort. “Wish I could shag you,” he said.  
  
Harry blinked. Smiled, and answered, “Yeah.” And then thought about the implications. They hadn’t done that. Harry wasn’t sure he wanted to. The idea seemed large and heavy, a boundary he hadn’t crossed yet, hadn’t thought to cross. And yet, even now, he could safely say that he wanted Draco in almost any way possible, as long as it meant they could touch again.   
  
But sex meant too much movement. Too much effort, and strain. Harry watched Draco’s hands clutch at the blanket on which they rested and relax again.   
  
Gods.  
  
“You alright?” he asked softly.  
  
“Better be,” was Draco’s answer.  
  
He hadn’t moved for weeks, except to use the loo, to sit up for food. To adjust the covers over his legs or to make room for more pillows. The air in the room felt caustic and staticky, as if one tiny tremor would send it cascading. Send Draco cascading. It was on Harry’s mind every moment, and he knew it was on Draco’s.  
  
“She’ll be alright,” he whispered.  
  
Draco’s face did a strange sort of shiver, and Harry’s heart ricocheted in his chest. It was the first time he’d ever seen the depths of Draco’s worry, and they were deep.  
  
Draco gave a cautious shrug. “We’ll see. Might just be wasting our time with this name argument.”  
  
It was a careless statement, but brimming with tension. Harry felt the slow roll of the baby under his palm.   
  
“Going to kiss you,” he said simply.  
  
Draco’s eyes shifted to his, and then his head turned. Harry slid his hand further across Draco’s belly until he could cradle his lover’s hip. He brushed his nose against Draco’s cheek, and then found his mouth and remained there for as long as Draco let him.  
  
~*~  
  
He should never have opened the door. And he should have known that no amount of frantic locking spells afterward would hinder the Malfoys.  
  
Lucius and Narcissa strode into the flat as if they owned it— they most likely thought they did— leaving the door to bang off the wall. Harry, whose mind went inexplicably to the fact that Draco should have been resting in silence, gave way before them until they were all three in the sitting room.  
  
He should have also known that no amount of giving way would keep any standard of silence while in the company of these people. The path of his thoughts seemed ridiculously obtuse, even to him. It was as if he were in shock.  
  
“Where is he?” Lucius Malfoy demanded in a clipped tone that indicated exactly what his opinion was of speaking to Harry at all. Narcissa lifted her chin, eyeing Harry down her nose, but said nothing.  
  
“He’s not here,” Harry ground out. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, intruding in my home like this?”  
  
“Don’t be preposterous,” Narcissa snapped. “He informed us of his… situation. We know he is here; he is no longer at that hospital.”  
  
It clicked, and Harry bit back a snort, not at all successfully. “Certainly took you long enough. How many times did you read that newspaper article anyway before you decided it bothered you?”  
  
Narcissa’s eyes went hard and black. She suddenly looked a great deal more edgy than before. Her gaze flicked to her husband.   
  
Lucius’ lip curled. “You’re lying. And you will remove yourself from our vicinity,  _Mr_  Potter. He is our son, and we demand to see him this instant!”  
  
“And I demand that you get out of my house!” Harry snapped back. Narcissa arched her neck back like a snake about to strike. But it was Lucius Malfoy who closed the gap once more.  
  
“You are not fit to be in our presence, no matter who owns this miserable little hovel,” the man hissed. “Where is Draco?”  
  
“Sleeping,” Harry grated. “And not about to be disturbed from it.”  
  
“He is not injured?” Narcissa said quickly. Harry glared at her, fed up with the whole thing. But there was really no good reason to slice open another unnecessary wound, if there were actually any to begin with.  
  
“No,” he answered shortly. “But if you keep him from rest, I swear to you—”  
  
“Just what are you planning to do, Potter?” Lucius sneered. “No claim of yours will stand up to the claims of blood relatives. Our son is a Malfoy, and he—”  
  
“Funny how that matters  _now_ , isn’t it?” Harry shot back.  
  
Narcissa’s face did something funny, but again, her husband’s fury overrode it. “You pompous, arrogant little— You will take us to our son immediately! You’ve no business keeping him from us!”  
  
“Get out,” snarled a voice from the doorway.   
  
All three of them turned to find Draco standing between the sitting room and the hallway, one hand clutched whitely around the jamb, eyes dangerously wide and dark. Harry’s heart skittered hard against his ribs. Draco stepped forward, unsteady but driven by something much more formidable. “Get out of here. Now.”  
  
“Draco,” Narcissa breathed, the first truly genuine smile Harry had ever seen stealing over her face. It looked like relief.  
  
Her son snapped his gaze to hers so fast Harry blinked. “I said  _leave_.”  
  
Lucius spoke. “Draco, you are not well. We are concerned for your health, especially in your… state.”  
  
“After three weeks, you’re concerned?” Draco launched himself into the room on furious steps, and it was no mean feat that his parents held their ground. “How long  _did_  it take you to decide that I mattered? Not that you bloody well care.”  
  
“Draco,” Narcissa said again softly, pleadingly. Harry would have been more intrigued if he hadn’t been so scared for Draco’s health. Gods, what was he doing? Shouldn’t be up, he shouldn’t be  _up_ , for Founders’ sake— Frustration zinged through Harry’s body, helpless and horrible. But Draco’s paleness was nothing to his anger.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” he snapped at his mother. “Don’t you dare come in here and tell him what to do! As if you have any say! Get out of this flat.”  
  
And then Harry noticed Draco’s left hand. It was cradled gently around his middle, supporting the low-riding swell.  
  
A lump shoved its way unexpectedly into Harry’s throat. If either elder Malfoy had turned on him at that moment, he would have been sorely beaten into the ground by their caustic threats.  
  
“You will not speak to us in this manner,” Lucius hissed, but Draco interrupted him almost before the words had left his lips.  
  
“I don’t give a fuck what you think. You can take your righteousness and shove it, for all I care! You made it perfectly clear where I stand months ago. And if you don’t get out of this flat in the next three seconds, I will use an Unforgivable on you, and I don’t particularly care which one!”  
  
With his free hand, Draco raised his wand and pointed it directly into his father’s face. It did not quaver in the slightest. Harry felt the crack of magical energy whispering on the air. The Malfoys must have felt it too; neither of them said anything. Lucius lifted his chin, mouth twisting horribly, then turned around with regal flair and headed for the front door. Narcissa hesitated only an instant longer, staring at her son as if she had never seen him before— her eyes dropped repeatedly to his middle— before following her husband in a more subdued manner.  
  
Harry didn’t even watch them leave. The sound of the door opening came as though through cotton. Draco’s wand hand dropped slowly as the door clicked shut again behind his parents.  
  
~*~  
  
The labor arrived quickly after, rushing in like a torrent, harder and sharper and more raw. Draco’s face lost all of its colour, turning ashen and clammy. Harry laid him down in the middle of the sitting room floor, right where he’d been standing, watched the man’s hands flit and tremble back and forth over his swollen abdomen, and waited for the Healers.  
  
It only took a few seconds for them to arrive. But Draco had already stopped speaking, stopped making any noise whatsoever. Those seconds felt like hours.  
  
~*~  
  
Ninety minutes later, Harry had a daughter.  
  
~*~  
  
She was quite small. Her eyes seemed a little too big for her face, which was extremely soft and awfully red. She had nothing that could rightfully be called hair, but there was—  
  
Harry ran his hand very gently over her tiny head. It felt fuzzy, like a soft toy. She wiggled one arm, bumping his other wrist where it rested beside her on the bassinet.  
  
“She’s small,” the Healer spoke from behind him, “but healthy. Hasn’t cried, if you are curious. She’s proving to be a quiet infant.”  
  
Harry swallowed, staring down at the little creature. The outfit they had her in had been spelled down to her size, and still she swam in it, bunches of warm fabric at her wrists and around her tummy. She did not move much, and only stared at him out of eyes that were a surreal blue.  
  
“How’s Draco?” Harry whispered, afraid to ask, and afraid not to. Surely the woman would have said something immediately if—  
  
Harry heard the Healer sigh. “He hasn’t woken. The second labor came at least a month and a half early.” She paused, and then seemed to decide to continue. “With male bearers, there are more limitations on premature births. Even half of a month early counts as awfully premature.”  
  
Harry turned from his daughter and looked the Healer directly in the eye. “Is he alright?” he said. His own voice sounded hoarse.  
  
Her face gave nothing away. “We will have to wait and see. He should wake in a day at the least, a week at most. He is being monitored and there are no outstanding complications. It will be a question of how his body handled the early birth.”  
  
“Can I see him?” The words burst free, having been held in as long as possible, but inevitably escaping.  
  
“He must stay in a sterile environment for at least twelve hours,” she said. “You may stay the night and see him in the morning.”  
  
And then she stepped closer— a jerky movement, as if she wasn’t sure she should be doing it— and touched her fingers to Harry’s shoulder. “We should know within a week,” she said in a low voice.  
  
She withdrew a few seconds later, leaving Harry alone in the warm, bright room, with a little newcomer that… he didn’t know. There was an emptiness in his gut, a lost place that he feared the filling of. Fear itself was not there, yet. Harry turned dazedly back to the bassinet, eased down to sit on the floor, and leaned his head on his arms so he could stare at his baby.  
  
~*~  
  
The hospital was a searingly bright, bustling place, full of people walking purposefully here and there around Harry’s small sphere of turmoil. He sat in the nursery, or in the waiting room with his daughter wrapped in blankets, and felt very detached from the entire world. He could feel mild Disillusionment Charms permeating the ward; no one outside of the hospital staff paid him any mind. It was both a relief and a depressing fact. Harry had no idea if it was standard procedure or if it had something to do with his presence. Or Draco’s.   
  
At any rate, they weren’t bothered, and no newspaper articles made their situation known.  
  
Visiting Draco’s room was supposed to have been a fear at last assuaged. Instead it was a dull, darkened place, with four nondescript white walls and a single bed in the center, housing its unconscious occupant. Harry didn’t know why he’d been expecting a miracle. He only knew his core-deep disappointment when Draco did not open his eyes the first day, only continuing to breathe in and out slowly, his forearms pale even against the light sheets they rested on.   
  
He looked very strange with his stomach flat again. Strange, and sick. Harry’s emotions slithered in and out of his control as the hours passed, as the baby woke and slept again, fed, and was eventually taken by a softly smiling nurse who cooed and walked her back to her bassinet for the night. Harry passed out in the chair beside Draco’s bed, and when he opened his eyes the next morning, Draco had not woken.  
  
He spent the next two days at St. Mungo’s before the Healer returned and informed him that he was allowed, even encouraged, to take his daughter home. The environment there would be better for her, quieter and more comfortable. Harry’s concerns for her health were alleviated, and his fears for Draco urged to the side: he would be allowed to visit every day (all day, if he liked), and informed immediately should anything happen.  
  
He wanted to argue. But he was out of energy. Out of stamina. And so he took their daughter home.  
  
~*~  
  
Two should be enough. Or perhaps three. Three looked fine…  
  
Harry gave up and bent down, grabbing a fourth pillow from the floor. The bedroom was full of lazy light and the day’s faint trapped heat. The bed was neatly made, and looked perfectly huge with no one but his tiny, tiny baby in the middle of it, her head turned to the side in sleep. Her mouth was open, and her breathing went easily in and out at a steady pace.  
  
Surely four pillows was enough.  
  
He’d built a veritable wall of plushy softness between his child and the floor, which seemed to be much further down than it had been before. And much harder, even with the thick rug. Harry turned for the door, made it half a step… and came back to the bedside with a helpless sigh. He couldn’t leave the room. There was no telling what might happen, she might wake and roll, and somehow… shove the pillows…  
  
“Oh, you’re ridiculous,” Harry chastised himself, lowering himself to sit on the bed. He smiled bleakly at the wall, and then pulled two of the pillows away and lay down carefully, trying not to jostle the bed. He curled up on his side and tucked an arm under his head. And went back to watching his baby.  
  
She was so easy to watch. There were new things to notice all the time, like the way her eyebrows— so faint, almost not there— tapered very slightly at the ends, just like Draco’s did. There was her nose, which looked scrunched when she slept, and buttoned when she was awake. She had long toes and short fingers, and there were never going to be clothes that were this small, and she was a snacker, he could tell after only a couple days. Never ate more than an ounce or two at a time, and always wailed for more within an hour. It was the only time she made any sound, really, save for the sucking on her own fingers and the tiny mumbles Harry wasn’t sure she knew she was making.  
  
She was so warm. She radiated heat when he was holding her, when he was cradling her in his lap, even now when she slept nearly two feet from him. He could feel it.  
  
Harry reached over her and adjusted one of the pillows, bringing it close to tuck against her side. Her nose squinched up in sleep and relaxed.  
  
Gods, she looked like Draco. And gods, Harry  _missed_  him.  
  
It was a good thing the baby napped so often; Harry barely got any sleep at night. All he could think about was the lonely hospital room and the fact that Draco had not woken up yet, had not even twitched as far as the hospital staff knew. He’d been informed that Draco’s tests had come back clean, that he had most definitely moved from unconsciousness into sleep. But still he did not wake, and as often as Harry was told ‘not to worry,’ there was nothing else he could do at night when there was only darkness and the sleeping sighs of the baby, and an otherwise empty bed where there should have been another adult body.   
  
It was so difficult not to hate the elder Malfoys for what their arrival had brought on. Harry eventually stopped trying and let the helpless frustration seep in and out of himself until he felt blank and exhausted.  
  
Harry took the baby for short walks, watched her stare at the turning leaves in that pensive way of hers, fielded admiring comments from the people who meandered past and paused to make googly noises at her. And thought of Draco, every moment.  
  
~*~  
  
The third day home, Harry sat blearily on the couch and drank scalding coffee. The baby kicked her little legs on a soft, thick blanket at his feet, swaddled enormously into her Muggle babygrow. Harry had finally gone exploring for other baby clothing. The flat was beginning to look more like the home of an infant, with a safety-charmed high chair and several plushy toys and rattling things. There was a baby bath basin on the kitchen counter, and there were more than enough nappies now, and blankets.  
  
But Harry had not been able to bring himself to enlarge the closet room.   
  
When the post arrived at last to a desolately silent flat, it included a neatly wrapped and tightly tied package with nothing but the wax seal of Malfoy on the upper left-hand corner. Harry considered not opening it at all, half out of vengeance, half out of fear for his own life. But at last, he ripped the expensive paper free and shook the contents out across the couch.  
  
Inside was the number to a Gringott’s vault, and a burgeoning pouch filled with Galleons.  
  
The parchment inside, blank, cleared its throat and spoke in the low, finessed tones of Narcissa Malfoy: “I insist that you do not attempt to return this, Mr Potter.”  
  
~*~  
  
“Come on, Baby. Time to go see Daddy again.”  
  
His nameless little baby made an equally little mewling noise as he bundled her up— it was growing cooler outside every day— and grabbed her changing bag. They headed out of the flat and downstairs to hail a taxi.  
  
~*~  
  
This time, the Healer was waiting for them outside Draco’s room.  
  
“Good news, Mr Potter,” she said briskly. “He’s not awake, but my spells indicate he is coming out of it. Perhaps within the next hour or so.” 

She let him into the room without another word and shut the door behind them. Harry set the changing bag down on the floor and made his way through the room to the bedside chair.  
  
~*~  
  
The baby hadn’t even finished her second bottle when Draco made a sound. It was just a murmur, like a forgotten word. Harry looked up, and the baby turned her head as well, as if she’d heard it, too. The room was dimly lit, half of Draco’s bed in light and the other half in darkness, but Harry could see the other man’s face tensing as he came up out of sleep.   
  
The hole in Harry’s chest filled so rapidly that he could do nothing but close his eyes and hold himself rigid until the swollen, hot feeling slid away again. His insides felt weak and overheated, and he swallowed. Opened his eyes. Rose as steadily from the chair as he could and made his way right to the bed’s edge.  
  
Harry knelt, holding the baby, and touched his free hand to Draco’s cheek. The other man stirred, another soft sound escaping him. Foggy eyes opened slowly.  
  
“Thanks for waking up this time,” Harry said softly. The relieved smile could not help but tug his mouth.  
  
Draco exhaled and gave a tiny nod. His eyes flicked down, up, then shut. Then open.  
  
Down.  
  
One hand crept from the bedsheets, shaking almost unnoticeably. “Is… Is that…”  
  
Harry watched fingers alight, as gently as a breeze, on peachfuzz-covered head. “Yeah,” he whispered.  
  
“Oh my,” Draco whispered back.  
  
It was such an un-Draco-like thing to say. For a long moment they both looked down at the baby, Harry unmoving, Draco’s hand drifting back and forth across her tiny forehead.  
  
Harry was unprepared, however, for the moment when Draco’s gaze rose to his and locked there. The blond’s lips parted wordlessly, and then closed again. His hand lifted and crept toward Harry’s.  
  
“Mira,” Draco whispered. His eyes begged, on the verge of a fall. “Please?”  
  
Harry grabbed Draco’s fingers and pressed them to his lips, and his own body shook at the familiar touch, at the well-known scent mingled with hospital magic. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes,” he managed through half-closed throat. “Oh, yes.”

*fin*

**Author's Note:**

> At the time I wrote this, I'd recently read Marley and Me by John Grogan, which had a section about the wife’s pregnancy bed rest, so part of my story is inspired by that. The summary is, of course, a much-altered quote from the film Casablanca. 
> 
> Thank you ever so to coffeejunkii for the beta, and of course to dysonrules and taradiane for poking me and saying "HEY. HEY. MISSING. POSTY."


End file.
